Grim Serial Killer War Room Shut
S P O K A N E, Wash., Aug. 9, 2001 -- The 20-by-20-foot room where detectives
spent three years tracking serial killer Robert Yates Jr. is a tidy
place.
Thousands of tips are catalogued in three-ring binders. Adetailed account of Yates' many travels covers three walls.Gruesome pictures of his decomposed victims are stored in photoalbums. Even though Yates pleaded guilty to killing 13 people and facestrial for the killings of two more in the Tacoma area on the otherside of the state, the office in the Spokane County Public SafetyBuilding is still in use. A handful of sheriff's officers are trying to get a completepicture of Yates' movements from January 1968 until his arrest inApril 2000. They share data with outside law enforcement agenciesinvestigating whether the 49-year-old married father of five isinvolved in unsolved murders in other areas. They are also helping Pierce County officials prepare for Yates'murder trial next year. "No one else has this information," said Sheriff's Sgt. CalWalker, a leader of the task force that caught Yates. "We arebecoming a clearinghouse for Yates' movements."
Fighting Killers, and Mark Fuhrman
The task force has also been conducting a public relationsbattle with celebrity crime author Mark Fuhrman, whose latest bookfaults the task force for not catching Yates two years sooner. Fuhrman, the Los Angeles police officer who found the bloodyglove in the O.J. Simpson case, says the task force spent too muchtime building computer databases and chasing DNA samples, and toolittle time doing old-fashioned police work among the prostituteswho were Yates' victims. "Whether it was laziness, incompetence or just plain humanerror, the task force could have caught Yates back in September1997," sparing the lives of perhaps nine of his victims, wroteFuhrman, who lives nearby and has a Spokane talk radio show thatfocuses on crime. The Spokane County Sheriff's Office has been outraged byFuhrman's comments. Walker said the overwhelming physical evidenceagainst Yates, primarily DNA, was what prompted him to pleadguilty. "The end result speaks for itself," he said.
Inside the War Room
As part of their rebuttal to Fuhrman, members of the task forcerecently let reporters into their office. The room once had 14 desks, but now there are four. A picture onone wall shows members of the task force dressed in Wild West garb,like a posse in pursuit of a desperado. On another wall aredrawings of the interiors of Yates' vehicles, including the whiteCorvette that ultimately linked him to the killings. Besides binders for some 6,000 tips, there are files holdinganalyses of plant and soil samples taken from bodies and 560videotapes from police and private surveillance cameras. "All had to be gone through," Walker said. He added that Yatesnever was the subject of a tip, nor he did not appear on any of thevideotapes. Key to resolving the case was DNA evidence found in carpetfibers of the Corvette that linked Yates to the 1997 death of a16-year-old runaway.
Yates Pleads Guilty to 13 Slays
Under a plea bargain to avoid the death penalty, Yates pleadedguilty in October to 13 murders and one attempted murder. He alsoconfessed to killing three other people and was sentenced to 408years in prison. Ten of the victims were women in the Spokane area in easternWashington, killed from 1996-98. In each case, the victims wereinvolved with drugs or prostitution or both. All were shot in thehead and most had their heads covered with plastic grocery bags.Their bodies were dumped in remote areas. Yates has never offered a motive, but sex appears to be the keyreason. The only known survivor, Christine L. Smith, told officersYates shot her only after he failed to become sexually arousedwhile she performed oral sex. Law enforcement officers, fearing the victims' families would beupset, have played down the sexual motives. The task force likely will go out of business at the end of theyear. "There are other problems out there," Walker said. "We willput this stuff away and use this room for another function."